I should have called this Jim’s Secret Robot Diary, shouldn’t I? Oh well. Anyway.

We captured an island.

Yes, we bounced back from our earlier troubles to capture the three bases of the island of Norhoop. This was, admittedly, mostly down to force of numbers. RPS’ Perpetuum corporation is now one of the large entities in the game, and our large robot gangs are often too much for others to deal with. We crushed a couple of small groups out of the island in our land-grab, which was a shame for them.

But yeah. That’s us.

That’s not to say that we’re not getting smacked about by more powerful gangs. We lost six mechs and support to a heavy-mech fielding gang just a few days ago, and the conquest of Norhoop has been characterised by a couple of big stand up fights and endless skirmishing. Our conquest of an island is being paid for in robotic flame.

Which is good, because robot-battles were why we came to the game in the first place.

We’re starting to the hang of the game’s slow and tactical engagements, working out how to use cover, and which robots end up complementing each other on the battlefield. We’ve also learned a few tricks in terms of using the game’s peculiarities to our advantage: storming my dying, heavily-plated mech on top of enemies – vaporising them in my explosion – has given us a couple of important victories.

Of course the key part of our success came from getting our supplies sorted out. The miners and industrialists of the corporation have been working furiously to give us the sort of economic advantages enjoyed by our competitors. One of the design oddities of Perpetuum is that you are able to sell directly to your corporation, which means that while many areas of the public market are slow or uncompetitive to the point of tumbleweed, internally to the robot-fielding organisations there’s often a busy and profitable industry.

The hard work put in by these chaps in both gathering resources and researching the production systems needed to churn out robots and hi-tech ordnance can’t be under-estimated, and I don’t believe we’d have been competitive with the more entrenched forces of the game if we’d still been wasting money on low-spec, expensive market equipment.

Nor can we be sure that we’ll hold onto our territorial prize. Recent engagements in support of our allies have shown that we’re still out-matched when it comes to large enemy gangs who are able to field heavy mechs – the top tier of robot that few of us are yet able to pilot. Not only that, but things in the game are about change pretty significantly, with the introduction of gamma islands.

As you can see from this dev blog, the plan for the player-terraformed islands is pretty ambitious, and it expands the existing world of Perpetuum (which can feel a little small at times) to an enormous degree. I suspect there will be a minor influx of new players coming in to check this out, but the upshot should, ultimately, be a lot more combat as the factions rushes to claim new territory and exploit its resources.

So that’s the next challenge for our little robot army. And I am beginning to think we’ll be up to it.

Perpetuum has a free trial. You can find us in the RPS chat channel in-game.

Can some one please either briefly sum this up for me or point me in the direction of a summary/guide/whatever.

How part time/weekend warrior friendly is it? Seems from what I can see to be a bit like EVE online which I unfortunately never really had enough time for. Trying to avoid downloading the trial until I get a idea of how horribly addicted I’ll get

If you’ve ever wanted to try Eve but were intimidated by it, give this a shot. There’s a time commitment as far as needing to defend your bases against other player groups at the intervals when the base becomes vulnerable, and a need to gain income, but your skill points accumulate even when offline. The RPS clan are a stellar bunch, and will get you on your metal, stompy feet in no time.

Cheers mate. Was never really intimidated by EVE (played for the best part of a year spread over about 5) but was always in a small corp with real life friends and the time commitment expected was just to much for me.

Could i get away with logging on every few days or is it more small amount daily required?

You can pretty much play as you please. Your skill points will accumulate as long as your subbed, and if you find a good corp (i.e. us), you’ll be able to get robots and fittings cheap. There’s a lot that’s immediately similiar for anyone who’s spent time with EVE, and a lot that’s different enough to keep the game interesting.

Even if you only log on for PvP or PvE ops, you’ll be able to make a difference.

I just can’t bring myself to commit to perpetuum while I’ve also got two Eve accounts and am expecting to get into guild wars 2 whenever it comes out this year. Too much at once, I fear, and I’m not keen on abandoning Eve in what is arguably going to be one of its most interesting years.

It’d be nice if there were a free to play model in addition to subscribing. I’d love to roll with the RPS gang and shooty robots, but my initial experience with the game and the above reasons just don’t convince me :(